Research in the area of motion detection from images has generally been focused on the use of a static camera and improved pixel level optical flow. When an active camera is used, i.e. one that is moving, motion detection is more difficult because the motion of the camera must be factored into consideration. Attempts have been made to compensate for a camera's motion by first addressing the camera movement and then by directly attempting to find salient motion relative to the camera motion. Limitations of the current methods include the false identification of the background motion resulting from the active camera as a target or the targets being ignored and lost in the noise of the camera motion. Further, in the presence of video degradation such as noise, compression artifacts, and reduced frame rates, the performance of state-of-the-art optical flow algorithms greatly diminishes, resulting in extremely slow algorithms that are not suitable for real-time analysis. A need exists for an improved system and method for detecting motion of moving objects using a moving camera.